GELFAND’S WORLD-It was a conversation at a holiday dinner with friends from other states. I was told that you can't really convince people about things like global warming, evolution, or the utility of vaccines and nuclear power plants. Our visitor pointed out that no matter how I might try to present the positions taken by scientists, the other side could always trot out a PhD or MD with the counterview.
It was at that point that I realized the point that I will try to make here. It has to do with the fact that science develops and evolves its views based on accumulating bodies of evidence, experiment, and theory. Some proposals such as global warming begin as a hypothesis, accumulate evidence so as to become a realistic possibility, and eventually become so well established by a preponderance of the evidence that working scientists simply stop worrying about the question marks. That is actually the rational approach to life, because if we worked on proving global warming to nine decimal places, there wouldn't be time or scientists to work on anything else.
The hidden truth in the above paragraph is that most scientists are intellectually honest, and are trying to evaluate the evidence on a rational basis. In other words, they take things as they arrive, and have to be open minded enough to deal with swerves in the data and new findings. For example, it is possible to predict a global cooling based on the dust kicked up by a nuclear war, a cooling that could be as equally damaging as the current proposal of long term global warming based on a more prosaic but chronic issue, the fact that humanity is busy burning most of the fossil carbon that nature has laid down over millenia.
What's not communicated to the lay public at a sufficient level is actually fairly simple. At some point, you have to stop, look around, and realize that the experimental findings, although incomplete and never perfect, are really pretty convincing. It's time to take human caused global warming as an established fact, and move on. How we might move on is another question, one which involves all kinds of politics and economics, but move on we must.
Prior to this point, there may be a lot of discussion and a certain amount of anticipatory anxiety. When you look at a developing line of science such as the global warming hypothesis, will there be any scientists who don't agree with the initial conclusions? Sure. We are all aware that such existed. They published their countervailing opinions, gave speeches at scientific meetings, and generally participated in the scientific process.
As the scientific discussion on global warming continued, and research progressed, the number of genuinely opposed scientists began to dwindle. From the standpoint of the working scientist, this is nothing at all special or surprising. As data accumulates from all kinds of different approaches, and most or all of it is consistent with the global warming hypothesis, it is to be expected that most scientifically educated people would find the developing consensus fairly convincing.
I think that this is the position of most working scientists at the moment. The fact that there may be a few argumentative souls who still want to argue the point is simply a characteristic of our species.
What's interesting about the opposition point of view is that it doesn't really consider the sum total of all the data and the many calculations. It generally finds the few people with the appropriate letters after their names who disagree with the prevailing consensus, and quotes them ad nauseam. The creationists have been using this approach for decades.
What the opposition leaders don't seem to be willing to do is to consider the truth or falsity of their own conjectures. At least they don't do so in a manner that most of us would consider to be rational and honest. They have a built in bias towards one position, whether it's the idea that the earth was created six thousand years ago or the idea that George W. Bush was complicit in the 911 tragedy, and they cherry pick whatever data and arguments they can find. They then repeat those arguments with complete disregard for the preponderance of the evidence.
There is one other point about working scientists. Most, if I read them correctly, are not into conspiracy theories. Sure, I've got a friend who was concerned about the destruction of one of the buildings in New York that did not happen to be hit by an airplane, but for the most part, working scientists are reasonably skeptical about outrageous assertions, don't believe that vaccines cause autism, and never took any of the Ebola conspiracy theories seriously. There is enough complexity in the real world to keep serious thinkers busy, without having to involve James Bond levels of fictionalized plots.
When you put this all together, you come up with a basically rational group of people who will argue over nitpicky points of data, but don't pull out supernatural explanations for everyday observations in order to make theories acceptable. They don't take astrology seriously (read Isaac Asimov on this topic if you want to find a few choice tidbits), they are seriously annoyed at otherwise rational people who refuse to have their children vaccinated, and they don't take perpetual motion machines seriously.
It seems to me that our dinner companion had put his finger on something significant, and if I had to take as much time as I did, and expend the amount of effort that was required, then there is something wrong with our educational system and something just as wrong with our news media.
Put it this way: When a local television news program -- one which is generally respected -- quotes a cancer quack without checking on the validity of the claims, that is a problem. When I write a few words pointing out that a collection of distinguished scientists and engineers defend nuclear power as an essential part of our defense against global warming, and readers write to the CityWatch publisher insisting that CityWatch never run anything written by me ever again, that suggests the same sort of problem. When well known environmental organizations treat opposition to genetically modified foods as something approaching a religious dogma, I think it is also representative of an irrationality that plagues our culture.
To put it another way, the latest shenanigans of the conservative Republicans in congress are plenty scary, particularly the revelations that congressional leaders want to put muzzles on the EPA and to reduce the ability of the NIH to do leading edge science. These are the big threats to a rational world view and to scientific progress. But the other side of the political fence should also mend its ways, by which I mean accepting a rational approach to scientific questions that can otherwise get bogged down in politics.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
